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Disney's UK online store sucks

Published on: November 3, 2005 by Paul Boag

Today, I am ashamed to be British, no wait, that's not right. Today, I am ashamed of an American multi national treating us Brits like second-class citizens. Yeah, that sounds better. Disney has launched their new UK store and has made an embarrassing hash of it.

A while back, you may remember I slated the National Trust for their new website. Well, that was nothing compared to the state of the new Disney site.

I am not going to list all the things that are wrong with it. Molly Holzschlag has done a great job of doing that in her open letter to Disney. What I will say is that the Disability Rights Commission estimate that disabled users in the UK have a spending power of £50 billion and I would be surprised if any of that make its way into the hands of Disney (at least not via their online store). If you have anything less that 20/20 vision, this site is going to be a challenge, mainly because 90% of the homepage is presented as images!

Come on people, I really thought that we had moved beyond this!

Comments

Comments are for the discussion of this post. If you have other questions / comments then post them to the forum or send me an email

  • Post by Ben Tupper on November 3, 2005 8:20 PM

    Furthermore, I took a look at not just the Disney Store UK site, but I went ahead and clicked through to Disney's main UK site. From their I found in their Fun Zone section something that seemed to be pretty cool. The Print Station page on their site is a great idea! I even printed a few coloring pages out for my son.

    But alas, Disney can't even get pages designed FOR PRINT to even print right! Most of the coloring pages print out in 2 pages: page 1 is the coloring image, page 2 is totally useless text that includes hyperlinks!!

    Why when I'm trying to print out a nice little single sheet for my boy to color on does it print 2 friggin' lines of text on a totally needless page 2 that includes links that are worthless in print?!?!?!

    Arrrrrrgggg!!! Feel my wrath Disney!

    So I have to go into my printer settings and tell it to only print page 1. Totally unnecessary Disney! What the hell?

    I would have to say that Disney's overall design all over the UK site is very retro. Unfortunately, like Dicso music, it's not the good kind!!!The Disney site design sucks!

  • Post by Anton on November 4, 2005 5:52 AM

    Oh, don't feel -too- bad... we Americans tend to treat everyone equally like second-class citizens. Har.

    Really though, it sucks. But I'm not surprised. Corporate America is taking a terrible long time in adopting modern thinking in web design. I believe there's quite a conspiracy theory in there that involves overpriced design shops, underhanded marketing directors, and buzzword-slinging executives that hand projects out to the man with the most colorful tie.

  • Post by Krystal on January 11, 2006 1:22 AM

    I enjoy the podcast greatly... but any chance that the American bashing will stop any time soon?... I know we suck.. I know we say "dude" and "totally" and these are faults indeed... I was just hoping...
    I've learned a great deal from the cast though. thanks

  • Post by Paul Boag on January 11, 2006 8:15 AM

    Hi Krystal,
    hey its only empire envy! America is big, powerful and successful so of course we are going to bash it ;) lol

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